Big Think Interview with John Irving | Big Think

Big Think Interview with John Irving

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Big Think sits down with the author of twelve novels, including "Last Night in Twisted River."

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JOHN IRVING:

John Irving is the author of twelve books, including “The World According to Garp,” “A Prayer For Owen Meany,” and most recently, “Last Night on Twisted River.” Over his career he has won a National Book Award, an Academy Award for his adaptation of “The Cider House Rules,” and many other honors, and has been translated into over thirty languages. A former competitive wrestler, he splits his time between Vermont and Montreal.

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TRANSCRIPT:

John Irving: I'm John Irving and “Last Night In Twisted River” is my twelfth novel.

Question: Does writing novels get easier with time?

John Irving: You know, because I write all my first drafts in longhand, in these lined notebooks, there's a certain excitement to me that that first blank page of paper doesn't know who you are, it has not read your previous works. So you feel as naive as this sounds, you feel as if you're starting a journey for the first time, whether it's the tenth or the eleventh or the twelfth time, and whether or not the same obsessions that have haunted you for most of your writing life will once again show themselves, you still feel it's a new adventure every time. I like that about the beginning process.

Question: How long was “Last Night in Twisted River” in your head?

John Irving: Well, for twenty years, my wife argues more than twenty years, but I have trouble remembering more than twenty years, for twenty years at least, this story about a cook and his pre-teenage son has been in my mind. Surprisingly I knew quite a lot about this story, as long as twenty years ago, but not enough to really get started. I began and finished several novels that have been in my mind not nearly as long because in their cases, the last sentences came to me and as you probably know, I never begin a novel until I've written that last sentence. In twelve novels, not even the punctuation in those last sentences has changed and once I get that last sentence, I can manage to make a kind of roadmap of the story, find my way back to where I think the book should begin. That's just been my process and continues to be my process.

But in this book's case, there was something missing from what I knew and I couldn't, for the longest time, I couldn't get that ending clearly in mind, although I knew a lot about the story. I knew these two men were fugitives. I knew they would be on the run for fifty years. I knew that the story began in a kind of frontier-justice sort of place, one law, a bad cop. I knew it was close to the Canadian border. And most of all, I knew why the cook had this twelve-year-old boy, because by the end of the novel, I knew that kid would have become a writer and it would turn out that he was actually writing the very story we've been reading. That may seem like a lot to know to not get started, but I saw that there were things that had been kept from this boy that he didn't know and I didn't know what those things were.

Question: Are there other sentences in your work that seem equally important?

John Irving: Well, there are certain sentences along the way that seem pivotal, or fragments of sentences. There are certain phrases that I see as being of use somewhere in a story. Sometimes actual chapter titles, sometimes locations. It's not a very elaborate roadmap, it's really a bunch of Post-It notes that either are on the wall in front of me or on the desktop where I work so that I can put my finger on any one of those signposts when I feel the need to. It's basically the skeleton of the story, it's the action of the novel. When did the characters meet? Do their paths cross again? Do they live? Do they die? If they die, when, where, how? Those kinds of things.

Question: What is your writing schedule?

John Irving: Well, when I'm not interrupted by traveling, or school holidays for children--those kinds of things--I get up pretty early. I feed the dog, I'm usually at my desk, [by] you know, 7:30, 8:00 in the morning and I work for eight or nine hours a day and I work seven days a week. But there are a lot of interruptions. I have three children, I have four grandchildren, I travel a lot. So I can't say that I work, you know, seven or eight hours a day seven days a week every week, but when I'm left to my own choices, that's what I do.

Question: How often do you change the events once you start writing?

John Irving: Very, very little. Sometimes...

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